Friendly fire may have killed Border Patrol agent

By Dashiell Bennett

October 5, 2012

After an incident that left one U.S. Border Patrol agent dead and another in the hospital, the speculation was that they had been killed by armed criminals, but now investigators are hinting that the two officers may have shot each other. Both NBC News and ABC News are reporting that federal investigators say they are considering the possibility that the two agents accidentally fired at each other in a moment of confusion while investigating a motion sensor alarm that was set off near the Mexican border. The incident took place before dawn on Tuesday, in a remote area near Naco, Arizona. The Border Patrol and FBI had no comment on the new report.

Despite the anonymous claims, Mexican authorities already arrested two people that they say are suspects in the agent's death. They were picked up in the state of Sonora a few hours after the shooting.

The agent who died on Tuesday was 30-year-old Nicholas Ivie, the fourteenth border agent killed in the line of duty since 2008. The other two officers involved in the incident were not identified, but one was treated and released from the hospital, while the third was unharmed. It was the first fatal shooting of Border Patrol agent since Brian Terry was killed in 2010, sparking the investigation of the Justice Department's "Fast and Furious" operation. The station where Ivie was based had been renamed after Terry.